Documenting chords in context of a song...

[Mike O]

Hi folks -

 

First post to your forum. Maybe you guys could help me. Here is the problem:

 

I have a songwriter who plays 2-4 chord voicings/inversions/changes per bar. He (and I) would like for him to be able to document the voicings. I cannot take the time needed to notate and he does not/will not do tab. Jazz type "fake book" lead sheets don't do the trick because what I need him to do is to transcribe the voicings in particular.

 

His method to date is to use pre-printed sheets of chord diagrahms. Each page has 20 or so "chord blocks". He then writes the words down between the blocks. Imagine a piece of piano "sheet music" whithout the piano notation; only with three to six chords per bar.

 

Does anyone know of a software program that will do this? Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.

 

Mike

[AlChuck]

Well, I'm not sure what the easiest thing you can do is. I'm pretty sure that most decent notation/transcription programs have the facility to generate chord diagrams and tab as well as standard notation. Many sequencing/recording applications can also do this. Case in point that I'm familar with -- Cakewlk SONAR. You can click on a guitar neck to generate notation from specific guitar voicings, and maybe block diagrams too, I haven't looked into that. Ah, a quick look at the help tells me it does that too, but it might be cumbersome for your use. It seems that you have to add the chords you draw on a grid to a chord library, meaning you have to give them a name. This might make what you want to do harder than some other tool that might just generate them from a guitar neck interface directly.

[Sylver]

I was just at a music store yesterday and I saw these little guitar chord diagram stamp things. It's just a grid, you fill in the notes. I think it was like 3 bucks.